Excerpts from the Book 'A History Of French Literature':

... grace they saw a deep and wide abyss. In closest connection with them was one man of the highest genius-author of the Provinciales and the Pens'ees -whose ...
... is defeated. Traces of preciosity are found in some of the earliest sentences that infirmity was soon overcome by La Rochefoucauld, and his utterances ...
... child rather than of a man. In 1654 he published a translation of the Eunuch of Terence of small worth, and not long after was favoured with the ...
... of Athalie. The play was at first coldly received Corneille and his cabal did not spare their censures. In a preface Racine struck back, but afterwards ...
... basis of belief upon which reposed the great art of the preceding century had given way. The analytic intellect distrusted the imagination. The conventions ...
... de la D'ecadence des Romains. Bossuet had dealt nobly with Roman history, but in the spirit of a theologian expounding the course of Divine ...
... et le Contre, a poem of faith and unfaith-faith in Deism, disbelief in Christianity. The meeting terminated with untimely wit at Rousseau's expense ...
... from his own ideas to others more in accordance with observed phenomena. He desired to be, writes a critic, and almost became, a pure intelligence ...
... lacks the power of the better portions of Paul et Virginie. The Harmonies de la Nature is a feeble reflection of the 'Etudes. Chateaubriand, to whom ...
... spirit. The Revolution, as a social upheaval, she failed to understand her ideal was liberty, not equality and Necker's daughter was assured that ...
... of the fact but from the ceiling his exalted oratory, generous in temper, sometimes wise and well informed, descended with influence. Jocelyn ...
... of Stendhal, not popular among his contemporaries, though winning the admiration of M'erim'ee and the praise of Balzac, predicted that he would be ...
... well, and, accepted as a master by the young critics of the Globe, he prepared the way for Sainte-Beuve. While such criticism as that of Villemain ...
... back from the Queen of Heaven the very document by which he had put his salvation in pawn. The sinner (Chevalier au barillet) who endeavours for ...
... Long before the date of any lyrical poems that have come down to us, song and dance were a part of the life of the people of the North as well as ...
... is striking: Guillaume de Lorris was a refined and graceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemly celebrant in the cult of woman, ...
... Jehan de Saintr'e, are perhaps the most instructive documents which we possess with respect to the moral temper of the close of the Middle Ages ...
... in search of universal knowledge. In 1530-31 he was at Montpellier, studying medicine and lecturing on medical works of Hippocrates and Galen ...
... poem the memory of Du Bellay is associated. The personal note, which is in general absent from the poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and exquisitely ...
... a kind of Don Quixote for his own day-an anti-romance-which recounts the pastoral follies of a young Parisian bourgeois, whose wits have been set ...